It illustrates the sense of entitlement that motorists have because they *mistakenly* believe that they pay something called ‘Road Tax’.

The fact of the matter is, however, that road tax was abolished in 1937 by Winston Churchill. The tax-disc that motor vehicles are required to display in their wind-shield is actually there to show that drivers have paid their Vehicle Excise Duty (VED), which is a tax related to the emissions that their vehicle produces – this is why low-emissions vehicles such as Smart cars, electric cars, G-Wiz etc. don’t pay this tax.

Just to be clear, VED does not pay for the roads. The roads are paid for through general taxation and therefore everyone has an equal right to use them. Another good (short) video about this can be found here. I’m posting this primarily because it’s getting boring having to explain it so often.

Some drivers mistakenly believe that ‘Road Tax’ entitles them use their vehicles to bully people on bikes, and this leads to some pretty disturbing behaviour, as can be seen in the following video:

Some rather cheeky and ingenious bikers think that, actually, maybe cyclists SHOULD pay VED based on their emissions, and they have come up with some very compelling reasons why this would not be such a bad thing. A link to their reasoning can be found here, but the gist of their argument is summarised by the graph below